Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A sneak preview of the next level of climate activism.
The Most Honest Book About Climate Change Yet
William T. Vollmann’s latest opus is brilliant, but it offers no comfort to its readers.
NATHANIEL RICH
OCTOBER 2018 ISSUEAuthors like to flatter themselves by imagining for their work an “ideal reader,” a cherubic presence endowed with bottomless generosity, the sympathy of a parent, and the wisdom of, well, the authors themselves. In Carbon Ideologies, William T. Vollmann imagines for himself the opposite: a murderously hostile reader who sneers at his arguments, ridicules his feeblemindedness, scorns his pathetic attempts at ingratiation. Vollmann can’t blame this reader, whom he addresses regularly throughout Carbon Ideologies, because she lives in the future, under radically different circumstances—inhabiting a “hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet.” He envisions her turning the pages of his climate-change opus within the darkened recesses of an underground cave in which she has sought shelter from the unendurable heat; the plagues, droughts, and floods; the methane fireballs racing across boiling oceans. Because the soil is radioactive, she subsists on insects and recycled urine, and regards with implacable contempt her ancestors, who, as Vollmann tells her, “enjoyed the world we possessed, and deserved the world we left you.”
Carbon Ideologies is a single work published in two parts, No Immediate Dangerand No Good Alternative, the bifurcation due to the insistence of Vollmann’s weary publisher and the limitations of modern bookbinding. Of all the writers working today, Vollmann must be the most free: He writes fiction, essays, monographs, criticism, memoir, and history, usually merging several forms at once, taking on subjects as diverse as Japanese Noh theater, train hopping, and the Nez Perce War, all the while dilating to whatever length suits him. (After 25 books, his career word count now rivals Zane Grey’s.)
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Nearly every book about climate change that has been written for a general audience contains within it a message of hope, and often a prod toward action. Vollmann declares from the outset that he will not offer any solutions, because he does not believe any are possible: “ Nothing can be done to save [the world as we know it]; therefore, nothing need be done.” This makes Carbon Ideologies, for all its merits and flaws, one of the most honest books yet written on climate change. Vollmann’s undertaking is in the vanguard of the coming second wave of climate literature, books written not to diagnose or solve the problem, but to grapple with its moral consequences.
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Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/william-vollmann-carbon-ideologies/568309/
Author William T. Vollmann seems a bit special even for a climate advocate. Back in April this year, Vollmann called for “regulatory hell” to force everyone to accept a greener lifestyle – an insight Vollman apparently reached by bathing his face in gamma rays, and other risky sounding activities.
My first thought after reading The Atlantic review was that I would rather choose the diet of radioactive insects and recycled urine than read Vollmann’s latest opus. But perhaps I am being unfair – after all, I haven’t read the work itself, just The Atlantic reviewer’s impression of the work.
If Vollmann wants to send Anthony a reviewer’s copy, I shall make an effort to read at least the first chapter, and report my impressions.
a murderously hostile reader who sneers at his arguments, ridicules his feeblemindedness, scorns his pathetic attempts at ingratiation.”
Took the words right out of my mouth.
(After 25 books, his career word count now rivals Zane Grey’s.)
This is just another Publisher’s attempt to get in more book sales before the Christmas market gets going.
He just writes what comes into his head. Prepublication success is measured in column inches in the posher publications. then the second hand book stores are flooded with discarded copies.
It all makes work for the publisher to do.
“Vollman called for… everyone to accept a greener lifestyle…” Does he not realize that burning fossil fuels is greening the earth at an accelerated rate? Desserts diminishing as vegetation flourishes? We don’t need “regulatory hell” to promote the greening of the planet. CO2 has never been and never will be a pollutant.
What a “drivel streaming machine”. He should takeout a patent!
Such a shallow pathetic echo of science fiction.
As written by William T. Vollmann with zero knowledge of science,
with zero knowledge of climate,
with zero knowledge atmosphere,
with zero knowledge of fluid interactions,
with zero knowledge of Earth Sciences,
with zero knowledge of physics,
with zero knowledge of particle physics…
But apparently with a comic book level of super villain fantasies and delusions.
Such a puerile work is unlikely to frighten anyone with common sense, or any smattering education of science, or basically any one with a maturity level greater than 10.
Methane fireballs! Wow. This climate change thing sounds serious. I wonder if the people in his book wasted all their money on futile gestures like windmills and solar farms when they should have been moving the cities back from the ocean, and building, um… fireball catchers.
Vollmann likes to eat insects and drink urine but he needs an excuse to do it. Just pretend you’re insane… or maybe you don’t have to pretend
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE ridicule this guy mercilessly. I’ll start.
Vollmer is no doubt bracing himself for the social upheaval and disruption that will be caused by emergence of hundreds of new mutants / superheroes that will inevitably pop up in the areas that handle lots of radio-active insects.
I’m personally hoping to become “Dragon Fly” but with my luck, I’ll probably be something like “Roach Man.”
If I do become Roach Man, I’m going to live in Vollmer’s couch. He’ll try to spray RAID on me to kill me, but I’ll simply consume the chemicals and grow stronger. Be very afraid, you stupid effin’ nimrod. Roach Man is coming to YOUR HOUSE.
Do I need a /sarc tag on that one? I didn’t think so… but in case I’m wrong, here it is belatedly. /SARC
The book is well named. Vollman is definitely an ideologist who has drunk the prevailing Kool Aid on global warming, but what if his fundamental assumption, that carbon dioxide causes global warming, is, in fact, wrong? My own research, in press with an international, peer-reviewed journal, and my numerous books on amazon, explain why this assumption is wrong, and why CO2 can’t function as a greenhouse gas in the Earth environment. The whole idea that doomsday is nigh may well sell books, but the reality that it’s not is comforting.